BLAME it to the ignorance, apathy, indifference, lack of diligence, and stubborn refusal to study history. The camp of Misfit Sara hardly knows and understands that modern history is not that compassionate or considerate to leaders, who have murdered their people. Misfit Sara and her ilk should have realized that a number of Nazi leaders in postwar history were imprisoned despite their advancing age and illness.
History has shown that these leaders could not in any way claim their advancing age and illness could be factors or their tickets to gain freedom, temporary or otherwise, from imprisonment. On the contrary, they are non-factors. When arrested and brought before a court of justice, especially in a court in Europe, they failed to convince the court that old age and illness should be factors that could lead to freedom, temporary or otherwise. In most cases, they were jailed and they died there. This is a reality that should be understood by the Misfit and her ilk.
In the petition for “interim liberty” (this is the term used in subsequent ICC communications), Nicholas Kaufman, the lawyer hired by the family of imprisoned Rodrigo Duterte to represent him argued that the former president should be given temporary freedom, citing his advancing age and ill health. Misfit Sara upped the ante by claiming that his father did not commit any crimes, although mountains of evidence showed he ordered and masterminded the murder of up to 30,000 people through his orders of extrajudicial killings.
Misfit Sara floated the possibility of his possible release of a third country, but the name of this country was redacted and not mentioned, although it was claimed to be one of the signatory-nations to the Rome Statute, the multilateral treaty that has created the ICC. In the past, two similar offers of political sanctuary was given to then dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who fled the country after the historic, near bloodless 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution.
Those countries were Tonga, an island nation in the South Pacific, and Panama, a country in Central America. Their offers of political sanctuary were regarded as ridiculous because they asked for tradeoffs. Tonga wanted Marcos to boost tourism there by building an airport and a modern hotel there. It also wanted Marcos help in developing its telecommunications infrastructure. Panama, though then strongman Carlos Noriega, wanted to have a cut of his alleged hidden wealth. He wanted a weekly payoff. It was highly possible that the country that offered sanctuary for Duterte wanted tradeoffs not different from what Tonga and Panama asked from Marcos.
Milivivoj Asner served as the police chief of a province in Croatia. Although a Croat, he believed in the Nazi ideology that fostered the racial superiority for the Germans. Asner was accused of enforcing racist laws during the Second World War and took part in the persecution and deportations of hundreds of Serbs, Jews, and Romani to concentration camps operated by the Ustase, a fascist organization that served as an adjunct of the Nazi party in Croatia.
In the ensuing confusion after the war, Asner moved to Austria and used a different name – George Asher. But historians discovered his wrongdoings during the war and he was brought before a court of law. Despite his advancing age (he was in his 90s) and claims of dementia, he still underwent prosecution.
Asner died in 2011 at 98 in a nursing home in Austria, which refused extradition claims by Croatia because he had dementia and sickly to stand trial. Despite his advancing age, Croatia still accused him of crimes against humanity and other war crimes. Age was a non-factor although Austria stood that Asner had to pay for his crimes.
Laszlo Csizsik- Csatary was a Hungarian police officer, who organized the deportation of approximately 15,700 persons to Ausschwitz, the concentration camp in Poland that became notorious for its gas chambers and crematoria. Shortly after the war, Csatary was convicted to have committed crimes against humanity but he fled to Canada. When the Canadian government revoked his citizenship in 1997 upon discovery of his dark past, he left Canada. He was discovered in 2011 to be living in Hungary. He died in prison at 98 while awaiting trial.
The case of Josef Schutz, a Lithuanian prison guard of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, was different because he was convicted of committing crimes against humanity at 101. He was the record breaker for being the oldest person to have undergone prosecution, public court trial, and conviction on Nazi related war crimes in the last world war.
For a while, Schutz was a prisoner of war, but, upon release, he lived in East Germany. When the two German halves reunited in the late 1980s, things turned different for Schutz. He was prosecuted and he was charged with 3,518 counts of being an accessory to murder. He underwent trial in late 2021 for the crimes against humanity. At that time, he was already 100.
Despite his persistent denials of any wrongdoing during the wartime period, he was sentenced to five years of imprisonment. That was after the prosecution presented war survivors and testimonials of the murder victims committed in the concentration camp. He died in prison a year later of natural causes at 102.
Nicolaus Barbie was a high official in the Nazi totem pole as he was the Gestapo chief in the city of Lyon in France. Klaus Barbie became notorious for the inordinary torture he personally did to arrested Jews and members of the French Resistance. He showed extraordinary sadism in their treatment, earning the unpalatable tag as “Butcher of Lyon.”
In the aftermath of the last war, where Nazi Germany lost, Barbie disappeared and resettled in Bolivia, a small South American country. He was used as a counterintelligence asset by the U.S. during the initial phase of the Cold War. He went to Bolivia using the ratlines established for Nazi leaders, who went to South America to escape arrest, prosecution,trial, and conviction of their war crimes.
A pair of intrepid enterprising journalists discovered Barbie, who remained an unrepentant Nazi ideologue. These stories helped lawyers to work for his extradition to France to face a court trial on his war crimes. They succeeded and in 1984, Barbie faced a tumultuous court trial in France, where he was confronted by survivors and families of his murder as the Gestapo chief in Lyon. Testimonials of his victims were also submitted to the court.
In 1987, the court rejected his explanations and he was convicted of lifetime imprisonment. Four years later, he died of cancer in jail at 77.
The examples have shown the deep tradition of the European court when it comes to crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide and torture. The court there is neither compassionate nor considerate when old age and illness are invoked or raised. It is not part of its tradition. It is more interested to determine if certain acts of crimes have been committed or not. This is something, which the camp of Misfit Sara should know and understand.
She and her minions should not raise false hopes to their followers because old age and illness are not given much weight for the release of the persons, who are accused of crimes against humanity and other war crimes in any court based in Europe. Blame it on the European tradition of law and court practice.
